“How shall I thank you for the pleasure and delight of
your excellent and pretty letter, enclosing the half quarter of my poor
mutilated pension? That pension makes me disposed to swear every time it comes.

“I have been busy in using borrowed books, which were
to be returned with great speed, and which were like woodcocks, all trail. They
cost me three weeks’ incessant application,—that is, all the
application I could command. I waited to begin a new article for the Quarterly till the first number was
published; and as that is so near at hand, will begin to-morrow. But if
Gifford likes my pattern-work, he
should send me more cloth to cut; he should send me Travels, which I review
better than anything else. I am impatient to see the first number. Young lady
never felt more desirous to see herself in a new ball-dress, than I do to see
my own performance in print, often as that gratification falls to my lot. The
reason is, that in the multiplicity of my employments, I forget the form and
manner of everything as soon as it is out of sight, and they come to me like
pleasant recollections of what I wish to remember. Besides, the thing looks
differently in print. In short, Mr.
Bedford, there are a great many philosophical reasons for this
fancy of mine, and one of the best of all reasons is, that I hold it good to
make everything a pleasure which it is possible to make so. And these sort of
Claude’s

Ætat. 35.

OF ROBERT SOUTHEY.

219

spectacles are very convenient things for a man who
lives in a land of rain and clouds; they make an artificial sunshine for what
some people would call gloomy weather. . . . .

“God bless you! In a few days I will create leisure for
another number of Kehama. I
have not written a line of it these last two months: first, I was indisposed
myself; then the children were; lastly, my wife. Anxiety unfits me for anything
that requires feeling as well as thought. I can labour, I can
think,—thought and labour will not produce poetry.

In haste, Yours,

Robert Southey.”

Grosvenor Charles Bedford (1773-1839)
The son of Horace Walpole's correspondent Charles Bedford; he was auditor of the
Exchequer and a friend of Robert Southey who contributed to several of Southey's
publications.

Claude Lorrain (1600-1682)
French painter whose idealized landscapes were much admired in Britain.

William Gifford (1756-1826)
Poet, scholar, and editor who began as a shoemaker's apprentice; after Oxford he
published The Baviad (1794), The Maeviad
(1795), and The Satires of Juvenal translated (1802) before becoming
the founding editor of the Quarterly Review (1809-24).

The Quarterly Review. (1809-1967). Published by John Murray, the Quarterly was instigated by Walter
Scott as a Tory rival to the Edinburgh Review. It was edited by
William Gifford to 1824, and by John Gibson Lockhart from 1826 to 1853.